I've spent almost my entire career as a journalist covering tech in and around Silicon Valley, meeting entrepreneurs, executives and engineers, watching companies rise and fall (or in the case of Apple, rise, fall and rise again) and attending confabs and conferences. Before joining Forbes in February 2012, I had a very brief stint in corporate communications at HP (on purpose) and worked for more than six years on the tech team at Bloomberg News, where I dived into the financial side of tech. Before that, I was Silicon Valley bureau chief for Interactive Week, a contributor to Wired and Upside, and a reporter and news editor for MacWeek. The first computer game I ever played was Zork, my collection of now-vintage tech T-shirts includes a tie-dye BMUG classic and a HyperCard shirt featuring a dog and fire hydrant. When I can work at home, I settle into the black Herman Miller Aeron chair that I picked up when NeXT closed its doors. You can email me at cguglielmo@forbes.com.

Keeping you in the loop on some of the things that happened around Apple this week.

iPhones in color. Here’s what we know: There will be a new iPhone introduced at a company event in September. Apple unveils a new iPhone every year and so not introducing a new model would be the headline here. As analysts have been saying for a year, Apple will update the iPhone 5 – though debate continues about whether it will include a fingerprint scanner — and add a less expensive iPhone model to appeal to all those would-be iPhone buyers who don’t want to pony up the bucks for Apple’s high-end smartphone. And of course, the buzz these days is all about color – the iPhone 5S may be available in black/silver, white/silver and possibly white/champagne – or gold (though why gold given that Apple’s previous flirtation with a gold device — 2004’s gold iPod mini — tanked so badly). The low-cost, iPhone 5C, according to Sonny Dickson, an Australian iPhone engineer who says he has the scoop on the new models, will be available in a pinkish red, a bright yellow, a lime green and cyan blue and white. (There’s also talk about how scratch resistant the iPhone 5C cover will be, and whether Apple is using metal-glass technology it acquired in 2010 from Liquid Metal – or maybe some new glass tech from Corning? I guess all will be revealed at Apple’s event, which will reportedly take place on Sept. 10.

Mapping out iOS 7. With the new iPhone comes a new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7. And among the many, many new features Apple’s team is working on is an update to the Map app released last year as a not-so-great replacement to Google Maps. Apple has been looking to hire mapping experts and this past week confirmed that it bought a small San Francisco-based startup, Embark, that offers transit info (something missing from Apple’s Map app). Last month, Apple bought Locationary, which handles points of interest in mapping databases, and HopStop, which provides access to transit information. You can be sure that Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t want to issue any apologies this year after the updated Maps is revealed.

Icahn tweets. Billionaire investor Carl Ichan, who tweeted last week that he had bought a “large position” in Apple, tweeted again this week that he’s planning on having dinner in September with Apple CEO Tim Cook. “Tim believes in buyback and is doing one. What will be discussed is magnitude,” Icahn said. If you haven’t been following along, Icahn said last week that Apple’s shares could be trading at $700 — and the company should use debt to buy back more shares. ”Apple has the ability to do a $150 billion buyback now by borrowing funds at 3 percent.” So is a bigger buyback coming? All I can tell you is that Apple shares were trading at $467.36 a share the day before Ichan announced his Apple stake. They closed yesterday at $501.02, a 7.2 percent gain. While that’s still a ways off from $700, the shares are heading in the right direction.

E-book saga continues. The Department of Justice, which won its e-book price fixing case against Apple last month, filed a revised remedy proposal after the judge overseeing the case said the DOJ’s original plan was too much and asked the government to meet with Apple to discuss a compromise. But the more interesting news to come out of the DOJ’s filing was that it said Apple continued to insist it had done nothing wrong: “They resist proposed changes intended to strengthen their internal compliance processes, refuse to undertake basic efforts aimed at restoring price competition in the marketplace, and even decline to commit to not repeating their anticompetitive practices in other content markets,” says the Justice Department filing. “Quite simply, Apple wants to continue business as usual, regardless of the antitrust laws. Under these circumstances, this Court should have no confidence that Apple on its own effectively can ensure that its illegal conduct will not be repeated. There must be significant oversight by someone not entrenched in Apple’s culture of insensitivity to basic tenets of antitrust law.”

Apple-Samsung get to keep their secrets. In other legal news, Apple and Samsung won’t have to make public secret financial data, source code and business plans. Judge Lucy Koh, who presided over the patent trial between the two last year which Apple won, had an order to make trial exhibits public. Apple and Samsung balked and the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. sided with them, saying the court can’t ask the companies to disclose “exceptionally sensitive information.” News groups including the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Wired asked that the information be made public. The appeals court said “If Apple’s and Samsung’s suppliers have access to their profit, cost, and margin data, it could give the suppliers an advantage in contract negotiations, which they could use to extract price increases for components. This would put Apple and Samsung at a competitive disadvantage compared to their current position.”

Microsoft bashes iPhone – again. It was a busy week for Microsoft, what with CEO Steve Ballmer announcing he’ll leave within the next 12 months and the stock soaring on the news. Microsoft gets criticized for not being as innovative or clever as its rivals, including Apple and Google. But I think there’s one place they deserve a nod – two funny commercials for Nokia’s Lumia 1020, which runs the Windows Phone operating system, and that take jabs at the iPhone. The newest “Recital’ ad is a follow up to the prior Windows Phone ad that shows the mayhem at a wedding (that ad has more than 6.3 million YouTube views.) Both ads are funny. Too bad for Microsoft and Nokia, though, that funny doesn’t deliver smartphone sales.

Are you there? Apple has filed a patent system in which iPhone users can check whether an iPhone user is available to talk, sort of an advanced form of caller ID. “The idea is simple and very much like an augmented version of the “Available/Away/Offline” system used by many instant messaging programs, including Apple’s own iMessage,” according to AppleInsider, which first reported on the patent. “Apple proposes a mechanism that automatically shares a phone’s operational status or “state” to would-be callers, replacing the conventional presence and availability options users set manually.”

MacPro. When Apple announced in June that it was finally updating its MacPro workstation later this year, marketing chief Phil Schiller, showing off the new design, noted memorably “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.” Well, there’s no word on when the Mac Pro will actually ship, but Apple this week released a new 51-second “trailer” showing off the design of the machine. Kind of slick.

Jobs, the movie, tanks. There have been many reviews of Jobs, the movie, released last week, including mine (one word: Redbox). We know Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak found it entertaining, but not enough to recommend it and that box office take was $6.7 million, a take described paltry and disappointing. Ashton Kutcher might not have gotten any kudos for his performance as Steve Jobs, but he did fare better at the Teen Choice Awards, in which he quoted Jobs, saying “Everything around us that we call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. You can build your own things…So build a life, don’t live one. Build one.” It’s in the last minute, in case you don’t want to watch the whole video.

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